Portobello Film Festival celebrates 30 years of free films with a special screening of Charlie Paul’s 2021 documentary For No Good Reason, featuring Johnny Depp, Terry Gilliam and Richard E Grant. The opening night at The Gate Picturehouse is the only ticketed event, just turn up on any of the other nights – all are free to attend.
The film explores the connection between life and art through the eyes of seminal British artist Ralph Steadman, who designed this year’s poster. For No Good Reason charts the large-scale disintegration of a demoralised youth culture that followed the legendary music, literature and art scene of the 60s and 70s, setting the tone for the festival’s origin story.
Since long before Hugh Grant and selfie sticks, Notting Hill has been at the heart of British counterculture, attracting generations of poets and writers, musicians and artists who populated the area’s squats and made music happen at every corner. Inspired by the area’s free music scene, a group of filmmakers and writers got together in 1996 to start a film festival that didn’t charge filmmakers for showing or movie lovers for attending.
For the first couple of years, Portobello Film Festival took place in a tent at Athlone Gardens, an open space at the Northern end of Portobello Road that has since been lost to redevelopment. In those days, many festivals were community-driven and politically charged; free access to others was secured through sponsorship – from Rock Against Racism in Brixton and Rise in Finsbury Park to Heineken Music Festival in city parks across the country. By the early 00s Portobello Film Festival was hosted across a diverse range of bars, cafes, cinemas and nightclubs, with movies moving on to Cannes, Edinburgh and Venice. With free submissions and a commitment to screen all entries, the programming ranges from short films shot on handheld camcorders to sleek productions, with filmmakers invited to introduce their work.
A relatively unknown Guy Ritchie launched his short film The Hard Case at the inaugural festival which in subsequent years saw the world premieres of the music documentary One Giant Leap and Roger Pomphrey’s Life, Death, And Damien during Hirst’s ‘Pharmacy’ period. One season included a film found dumped behind someone’s house accompanied by an improvised live soundtrack, another year Courtney Love came to support Pam Hogg’s Accelerator with Anita Pallenberg and Bobbie Gillespie. Anything goes at Portobello Film Festival in keeping with the punk spirit that inspired it.
Nightshift by the late Robina Rose captures “the time of punk, of squatting, or creative projects fuelled by the dole”. The recently restored film, based on a night working at the Portobello Hotel and starring punk icon and muse Jordan, is the second feature film in this year’s schedule and kicks off the main programme at the Muse Gallery on 29 August. Robina Rose lived locally and was a good friend of Portobello Film Festival and a regular contributor to events at the Muse, Joseph Strick’s Ulysses will be shown in her memory.
Portobello Film Festival was launched in August 1996 by a local collective including film director Barney Platts-Mills (Bronco Bullfrog), Black British writer Courttia Newland (co-writer for Steve McQueen’s Small Axe) and Jonathan Barnett who has led the festival ever since, supported by projectionist and programmer Raymond Myndiuk since 1999.
Over the last 30 years, they have shown more than 10,000 mostly independent productions, hot off the edit suite, often low budget, fresh ideas uncompromised by corporate protocols. All entries are currently being digitised and archived.
This year’s programme features 250 new films, many short, from hyper-local to across the UK and all over the world, with emphasis on Spanish films and grouped contributions from France, Asia and Iran. Highlights include a short film about the California fires set to an original score (The Sanctity of Faith by Stacey Stone by Stacey Stone) and a new comedy The Postman by award-winning writer/director Gavin Irvine. Winners of this year’s awards will be determined by a healthy mix of selectors’ choice and public response and announced on the closing day.
To complement the new entries and as a reminder of the festival ethos, the programme for Saturday 6 September is headed ‘Best things in life are free’ and dedicated to counterculture highlights, including Tonite Let’s All Make Love in London, Peter Whitehead’s 1967 documentary of Swinging London and a film about Sufi mystic Idries Shah commissioned for the BBC by David Attenborough.
The full programme is now live at: portobellofilmfestival.com / @portobello_film_festival
Tickets for Opening Event at the Gate Picturhouse on 28th August:HERE
all other screenings from 29th August – 14th September 2025 daily from 6pm to 10.30pm (drop-in, no ticket required)
Ralph Steadman, Once Upon a Time, The Muse Gallery
The Muse Gallery will also present an exhibition of prints and etchings by Ralph Steadman who created this year’s festival poster. Steadman began his career as a cartoonist satirising the British social and political scene of the 60s, In the 1970s he teamed up with Hunter S. Thompson which resulted in collaborations including Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas. Spending much of the 1990s travelling the vineyards and distilleries of the world for Oddbins, his work has appeared in many newspapers and magazines, from Punch and Private Eye in the early years to the New Statesman, The New Yorker and the Independent.
The exhibition runs from 28th August to 21st September with a PV on Thursday 4th September. themuseat269.london
